The Man Who Loved Children

By Christina Stead

The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.
Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.
First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was hailed for its satiric energy. Now its originality is again lauded by novelist, Jonathan Franzen, in his illuminating new introduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522864809

Christina Stead

Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.

Book preview

Introduction

By Jonathan Franzen

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read The Man Who Loved Children. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?

To read The Man Who Loved Children would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, it’s about nothing of world-historical consequence. It’s about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that aren’t about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the family’s private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, you’re still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.

Even the word enjoying: is that the right word? Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously good—is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity—and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence! Who needs to read this kind of thing? Isn’t the nuclear family, at least the psychologically violent side of it, the thing we’re all trying to escape from—the infernal reactor into which, when outright escape is not an option, we’ve learned to stick our new gadgetry and entertainments and afterschool activities like graphite rods, to cool the reaction down? The Man Who Loved Children is so retrograde as to accept what we would call abuse as a natural feature of the familial landscape, and a potentially comic feature at that, and to posit a gulf between adults and children far wider than their differing consumer tastes. The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours.

And then there’s your e-mail: shouldn’t you be dealing with your e-mail?

It’s 70 years since Christina Stead published her masterpiece to lackluster reviews and negligible sales. Mary McCarthy wrote an especially caustic notice for The New Republic, finding fault with the novel’s anachronisms and imperfect grasp of American life. Stead had in fact arrived in the United States less than four years earlier, with her companion, William Blake, an American Marxist and writer and businessman who was trying to obtain a divorce from his wife. Stead had grown up in Australia and fled the country decisively in 1928, at the age of 25. She and Blake had lived in London, Paris, Spain and Belgium while she was writing her first four books; her fourth, House of All Nations, was a gargantuan, impenetrable novel about international banking. Soon after she arrived in New York, Stead undertook to clarify her feelings about her unbelievable Australian childhood by way of fiction. She wrote The Man Who Loved Children on East 22nd Street, near Gramercy Park, in less than 18 months. According to her biographer, Hazel Rowley, Stead set the novel in Washington, D.C., at the insistence of her publisher, Simon & Schuster, which didn’t think American readers would care about Australians.

Anyone trying to revive interest in the novel at this late date will labor under the shadow of the poet Randall Jarrell’s long and dazzling introduction to its 1965 reissue. Not only can nobody praise the book more roundly and minutely than Jarrell already did, but if an appeal as powerful as his couldn’t turn the world on to the book, back in the day when our country still took literature halfway seriously, it seems highly unlikely that anybody else can now. Indeed, one very good reason to read the novel is that you can then read Jarrell’s introduction and be reminded of what outstanding literary criticism used to look like: passionate, personal, fair-minded, thorough and intended for ordinary readers. If you still care about fiction, it might make you nostalgic.

Jarrell, who repeatedly linked Stead with Tolstoy, was clearly taking his best shot at installing her in the Western canon, and in this he clearly failed. A 1980 study of the 100 most-cited literary writers of the 20th century, based on scholarly citations from the late 1970s, found Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein and Anaïs Nin on the list, but not Christina Stead. This would be less puzzling if Stead and her best novel didn’t positively cry out for academic criticism of every stripe. Especially confounding is that The Man Who Loved Children has failed to become a core text in every women’s studies program in the English-speaking world.

At its most basic level, the novel is the story of a patriarch, Sam Pollit—Samuel Clemens Pollit—who subjugates his wife, Henny, by impregnating her six times, and who seduces and beguiles his progeny with endless torrents of private language and crackpot household schemes and rituals that cumulatively serve to make him the sun (he is radiantly white, with yellow hair) around which the Pollit world revolves. By day, Sam is a striving, idealistic bureaucrat in F.D.R.’s Washington. By night and on weekends, he’s the hyperkinetic lord of the family’s run-down house in Georgetown; he’s the great I-Am (Henny’s words), the Great Mouthpiece (Henny again), Mr. Here-There and Everywhere (Henny); he’s the Sam-the-Bold (his own name for himself) who insinuates himself into every pore of his children’s beings. He lets them run naked, he spits chewed-up sandwich into their mouths (to strengthen their immune systems), he’s unfazed by the news that his youngest is eating his own excrement (because it’s natural). To his sister, a schoolteacher, he says, It’s not even right they should be forced to go to school when they have a father like me. To the children themselves he says things like You are myself and When I say, ‘Sun, you can shine!’ doesn’t it shine?

To a wild degree, Sam makes his children accessories of and to his narcissism. There isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature, and, in good narcissistic fashion, while Sam imagines himself a prophet of world peace, world love, world understanding, he remains happily blind to the squalor and misery of his circumstances. He is a perfect instance of the Western-rationalist male boogeyman stalked by a certain kind of literary critic. Through the fine accident of being forced to set the novel in America, Stead was also able to map his imperialism and his innocent faith in his own good intentions directly onto those of the city he works in. He is literally the Great White Father, he is literally Uncle Sam. He’s the kind of misogynist who adores femininity in the abstract but feels himself dragged down to earth—no, into the slime by an actual flesh-and-blood woman, and who believes that women are too crazy to be allowed to vote. And yet, though monstrous, he isn’t a monster. It’s Stead’s genius to make palpable on page after page the childlike need and weakness at the core of his overbearing masculinity, and to make the reader pity him and like him and, therefore, find him funny. The language he speaks at home, not baby talk exactly, something weirder, is an endlessly inventive cascade of alliteration, nonsensical rhymes, puns, running jokes, clashing diction levels and private references; quotation out of context can’t do it justice. As his best friend says to him, admiringly, Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world. His children are at once enthralled by his words and more sensibly grown-up than he is. When he’s ecstatically describing a future form of travel, projection by dematerialization, in which passengers will be shot into a tube and decomposed, his oldest son dryly declares, No one would travel.

The immovable objects opposed to Sam’s irresistible force are Henny and her stepdaughter, Louisa, the child of his dead first wife. Henny is the spoiled, amoral and now operatically suffering daughter of a wealthy Baltimore family. The hatred between husband and wife is heightened by the determination of each not to let the other leave and take the children. Their all-out war, aggravated by their deepening money troubles, is the novel’s narrative engine, and here again what saves their hatred from being monstrous—makes it comic instead—is its very extremity. Neurasthenic, worn-out, devious Henny, given to black looks and blacker moods, is the household hag (her word) who pours reality-based poison into her children’s eagerly open ears. Her language is as full of neurotic pain and darkness as Sam’s is full of unrealistic love and optimism. As the narrator notes, He called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig: they had no words between them intelligible. Or, as Henny says, He only wants the truth, but he wants my mouth shut. And: He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. But she doesn’t scream it at him directly, because the two of them haven’t been on speaking terms for years. She instead leaves terse notes addressed to Samuel Pollit, and both of them use the children as emissaries.

While Sam and Henny’s war takes up the novel’s foreground, its less and less secret arc is Sam’s deteriorating relationship with his eldest child, Louie. Many good novelists produce entire good oeuvres without leaving us one indelible, archetypal character. Christina Stead, in one book, gives us three, of which Louie is the most endearing and miraculous. She is a big, fat, clumsy girl who believes herself to be a genius; I’m the ugly duckling, you’ll see, she shouts at her father when he’s tormenting her. As Randall Jarrell noted, while many if not most writers were ugly ducklings as children, few if any have ever conveyed as honestly and completely as Stead does the pain of the experience of being one. Louie is forever covered with cuts and bruises from her bumblings, her clothes forever stained and shredded from her accidents. She’s befriended only by the queerest of neighbors (for one of whom, old Mrs. Kydd, in one of the novel’s hundred spectacular little scenes, she consents to drown an unwanted cat in the bathtub). Louie is constantly reviled by both parents for her slovenliness: that she isn’t pretty is a terrible blow to Sam’s narcissism, while, to Henny, her oblivious self-regard is an intolerable seconding of Sam’s own (She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice!). Louie keeps trying to resist being drawn into her father’s insane-making games, but because she’s still a child, and because she loves him, and because he really is irresistible, she keeps humiliating herself by surrendering.

More and more clearly, though, Louie emerges as Sam’s true nemesis. She begins by challenging him on the field of spoken language, as in the scene in which he’s expatiating on the harmonious oneness of future mankind:

My system, Sam continued, "which I invented myself, might be called Monoman or Manunity!"

Evie [Sam’s younger, favored daughter] laughed timidly, not knowing whether it was right or not. Louisa said, You mean Monomania.

Evie giggled and then lost all her color, became a stainless olive, appalled at her mistake.

Sam said coolly, You look like a gutter rat, Looloo, with that expression. Monoman would only be the condition of the world after we had weeded out the misfits and degenerates. There was a threat in the way he said it.

Later, as she enters adolescence, Louie begins to keep a diary and fills it not with scientific observations (as Sam has suggested) but with veiled accusations of her father, elaborately enciphered. When she falls in love with one of her high school teachers, Miss Aiden, she embarks on composing what she calls the Aiden Cycle, consisting of poems to Miss Aiden in every conceivable form and also every conceivable meter in the English language. As a present for her father on his 40th birthday, she writes a one-act tragedy, Herpes Rom, in which a young woman is strangled by her father, who seems to be part snake; since Louie doesn’t know much French grammar yet, she uses a language of her own invention.

While the novel is building to various cataclysms at the plot level (Henny is finally losing her long war), its inner story consists of Sam’s efforts to hold on to Louie and crush her separate language. He keeps vowing to break her spirit, claiming to have direct telepathic access to her thoughts, insisting that she’ll become a scientist and support him in his altruistic mission, and calling her his foolish, poor little Looloo. In front of the assembled children, he forces her to decipher her diary, so that she can be laughed at. He recites poems from the Aiden Cycle and laughs at these, too, and when Miss Aiden comes to dinner with the Pollits he takes her away from Louie and talks to her nonstop. After Herpes Rom has been performed, ridiculously, incomprehensibly, and Louie has presented Sam with the English translation, he pronounces his judgment: Damn my eyes if I’ve ever seen anything so stupid and silly.

In a lesser work, this might all read like a grim, abstract feminist parable, but Stead has already devoted most of the book to making the Pollits specific and real and funny, and to establishing them as capable of saying and doing just about anything, and she has particularly established what a problem love is for Louie (how much, in spite of everything, she yearns for her father’s adoration), and so the abstraction becomes inescapably concrete, the warring archetypes are given sympathetic flesh: you can’t help being dragged along through Louisa’s bloody soul-struggle to become her own person, and you can’t help cheering for her triumph. As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, That was family life. And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for.

Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.

And yet the culture isn’t monolithic. Although The Man Who Loved Children is probably too difficult (difficult to stomach, difficult to allow into your heart) to gain a mass following, it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you. I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it. I might never have found my way to it myself had my wife not discovered it in the public library in Somerville, Mass., 1983, and pronounced it the truest book she’d ever read. Every time I’ve been away from it for some years and am thinking of reading it again, I worry that I must have been wrong about it, since the literary and academic and book-club worlds make so little of it. (For example, as I’m writing this, there are 177 Amazon customer reviews of To the Lighthouse, 312 for Gravity’s Rainbow and 409 for Ulysses; for The Man Who Loved Children, a much more accessible book, there are 14.) I open the book with trepidation, and then I read five pages and am right back into it and realize that I wasn’t wrong at all. I feel as if I’ve come home again.

I suspect that one reason The Man Who Loved Children remains exiled from the canon is that Christina Stead’s ambition was to write not like a woman but like a man: her allegiances are too dubious for the feminists, and she’s not enough like a man for everybody else. The novel’s precursor, House of All Nations, more resembles a Gaddis novel, even a Pynchon novel, than it does any novel by a 20th-century woman. Stead wasn’t content to make a separate peace for herself, in a room of her own. She was competitive like a son, not a daughter, and she needed to go back, in her best novel, to her life’s primal scenes and beat her eloquent father at his own game. And this, too, is an embarrassment, since, however central competition may be to the free-enterprise system we live in, to cop to it personally and speak of it nakedly is very unflattering (athletic competition being the exception that proves the rule).

Stead, in the interviews she gave, was sometimes frank about how directly and completely autobiographical her novel was. Basically, Sam Pollit is her father, David Stead. Sam’s ideas and voice and domestic arrangements are all David’s, transposed from Australia to America. And where Sam is infatuated with an innocent girl-woman, Gillian, the daughter of a colleague, the real-life David fell for a pretty girl the same age as Christina, Thistle Harris, with whom he briefly had an affair, later lived with and eventually, after many years, married. Thistle was the beautiful acolyte and flattering mirror who Christina herself could never be for David, if only because, although she wasn’t fat like Louie, she also wasn’t remotely good-looking. (Rowley’s biography has pictures to prove it.)

In the novel, Louie’s lack of good looks is a blow to her own narcissism. Her fatness and plainness are, arguably, what rescue her from her father’s delusions, impel her toward honesty and save her. But the pain that Louie experiences in not being pleasing to anybody’s eyes, least of all to her father’s, is surely drawn from Christina Stead’s own pain. Her best novel feels finally like a daughter’s offering of love and solidarity to her father—you see, I am like you, I’ve achieved a language equal to yours, superior to yours—which is also, of course, an offering of white-hot competitive hatred. When Louie tells her father that she’s never told anybody what her home life is like, the reason she gives is that no one would believe me! But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see; and when the novel was published, the person in Australia to whom she sent a copy wasn’t David Stead but Thistle Harris. The inscription read: To dear Thistle. A Strindberg Family Robinson. In some respects might be considered a private letter to Thistle from Christina Stead. Whether David himself ever read the book remains unknown.

CHAPTER ONE

Henny comes home.

All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit’s children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home. They were not usually allowed to run helter-skelter about the streets, but Sam was out late with the naturalists looking for lizards and salamanders round the Potomac bluffs, Henrietta, their mother, was in town, Bonnie, their youthful aunt and general servant, had her afternoon off, and they were being minded by Louisa, their half sister, eleven and a half years old, the eldest of their brood. Strict and anxious when their parents were at home, Louisa when left in sole command was benevolent, liking to hear their shouts from a distance while she lay on her belly, reading, at the top of the orchard, or ambled, woolgathering, about the house.

The sun dropped between reefs of cloud into the Virginia woods: a rain frog rattled and the air grew damp. Mother coming home from the Wisconsin Avenue car, with parcels, was seen from various corners by the perspiring young ones, who rushed to meet her, chirring on their skates, and who convoyed her home, doing figures round her, weaving and blowing about her or holding to her skirt, and merry, in spite of her decorous irritations.

I come home and find you tearing about the streets like mad things!

They poured into the house, bringing in dirt, suppositions, questions, legends of other children, and plans for the next day, while Louie, suddenly remembering potatoes and string beans neglected, slunk in through the back door. Henrietta took a letter off the hall stand, a letter addressed to her, to Mrs. Samuel Clemens Pollit, which she tore open, muttering, with a half-smile, The fool! She went into the long dining room to read it, while Saul, technically the elder of the seven-year-old twins, hung from the chair back, saying,

Who’s it from, Mother, who’s it from? and his twin, strawheaded Samuel, tried to wrest her handbag from her, meanwhile repeating, Can I look in your bag, can I look in your bag, can I?

When she heard him, at last, she relinquished the worn old cowhide bag and went on reading, without paying the least attention to their excited examination of her keys and cosmetics, nor to ten-year-old Ernest, her first-born, who, after counting her money and putting it into little piles, said sagely,

Mother has two dollars and eighty-two cents: Mother, when you went out you had five dollars and sixteen cents and a stamp. What did you buy, Mother?

They heard Louisa coming, chanting, Hot tea, hot tea! Make way there! and shifted a quarter of an inch on their hams. Louie picked her way carefully through their midst, carrying a large cup of tea which she put down in front of her stepmother.

Did anyone come or telephone?

The paint came, Mother Louie stopped in the doorway. It’s in the washhouse.

Is he going to start painting and messing everything up tomorrow? Henrietta asked.

Louie said nothing but moved slowly out.

Mother, you spent two dollars and thirty-four cents. What did you buy?

What’s in this parcel, Moth? Evie asked.

Oh, leave me alone; you’re worse than your father.

Henrietta took off her gloves and began to sip her tea. This was her chair and also the one that all visitors sought. It was straight but comfortable, not too low, and set between the corner window and that cushioned bench which ran along the west wall. The children would line up on this bench and hang entranced on the visitor’s life story. Visitors looked awkward there, arrayed in the accidents of life’s put-together and rough-and-tumble, laughing uncouthly, unexpectedly at imbecile jokes, giving tongue to crackpot idioms; yet they thought themselves important, and it appeared that as they ran about the streets things happened to them. They had knots of relations with whom they argued and sweethearts to whom they cooed; they had false teeth, eyeglasses, and operations. The children would sit there staring with mouth open and gulping, till Henny snapped, Are you catching flies?

When Henny sat there, on the contrary, everything was in order and it was as if no one was in the house; it was like the presence of a somber, friendly old picture that has hung on a wall for generations. Whenever Sam was out, particularly in the afternoon, Henny would sit there, near the kitchen where she could get her cups of tea hot, and superintend the cooking. The children, rushing in from school or from the orchard, would find her there, quiet, thin, tired, with her veined, long olive hands clasped round the teacup for warmth, or gliding, skipping through wools and needles, as she knitted her pattern into bonnets and bootees for infants who were always appearing in the remote world. Then she would be cheerful and say to them in her elegant, girlish, spitfire way, A fool for luck, a poor man for children, Eastern shore for hard crabs, and niggers for dogs; and, I have a little house and a mouse couldn’t find it and all the men in our town couldn’t count the windows in it: what is it? When she had asked the riddle she would smile archly, although they all knew the answer, for Henny knew very few riddles. But these dear little rigmaroles would only come out when Daddy was out.

At other times they would find her, ugly, with her hair pushed back and her spectacles on, leaning over a coffee-soiled white linen tablecloth (she would have no others, thinking colored ones common), darning holes or fixing the lace on one of her lace covers inherited from Monocacy, her old Baltimore home. Then she would growl,

If you stand there staring at me, I’ll land you one to send you flying! or, Don’t gabble to me about the blessed snakes: it’s bad luck to have snakes, and he always keeps snakes for pets.

Now Henny sent little Evie running to get her hand lotion and nail buff while she discontentedly examined her great agate nails and complained about flecks in them and an injured half-moon,

I don’t know what I go to that woman in the arcade for; she hacks my cuticle too.

You have money on your tea, Moth! said Saul cheerfully.

Yes, that’s good, and she carefully lifted the circle of froth to her mouth in her teaspoon, but it broke, and at this she gave an irritated cry, Oh, there, now I won’t get any. The cup was a cup that their father had seen in a junk shop near P Street, old heavy china with the word Mother on it, between bunches of roses: and he had made them buy it for her for her last birthday.

Henny sat dreaming, with the letter in her lap. She was not nervous and lively like the Pollits, her husband’s family, who, she said, always behaved like chickens with their heads cut off, but would sit there still, so gracefully languid, except to run her fingers over the tablecloth, tracing the design in the damask, or to alter her pose and lean her face on her hand and stare into the distance, a commonplace habit which looked very theatrical in Henny, because of her large, bright eyeballs and thin, high-curved black eyebrows. She was like a tall crane in the reaches of the river, standing with one leg crooked and listening. She would look fixedly at her vision and suddenly close her eyes. The child watching (there was always one) would see nothing but the huge eyeball in its glove of flesh, deep-sunk in the wrinkled skullhole, the dark circle round it and the eyebrow far above, as it seemed, while all her skin, unrelieved by brilliant eye, came out in its real shade, burnt olive. She looked formidable in such moments, in her intemperate silence, the bitter set of her discolored mouth with her uneven slender gambler’s nose and scornful nostrils, lengthening her sharp oval face, pulling the dry skinfolds. Then when she opened her eyes, there would shoot out a look of hate, horror, passion, or contempt. The children (they were good children, as everyone said) would creep up, so as not to annoy her and say, at her elbow, Moth, can Whitey come in? or some such thing, and she would start and cry,

What do you mean sneaking up on me like that, are you spying on me like your father? or, Get out of my sight before I land you one, you creeper! or, What do you mean trying to frighten me, is it supposed to be funny?

And at other times, as now, she would sit with her glances hovering round the room, running from dusty molding to torn curtain frill, from a nail under the transom left over from the last Christmas to a worn patch on the oilcloth by the door, threadbare under so many thousand little footsteps, not worrying about them, but considering each well-known item, almost amiable from familiarity, almost interested, as if considering anew how to fix up these things when fatigue had gone and the tea and rest had put new energy into her.

Henny had never lived in an apartment. She was an old-fashioned woman. She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.

As Henny sat before her teacup and the steam rose from it and the treacherous foam gathered, uncollectible round its edge, the thousand storms of her confined life would rise up before her, thinner illusions on the steam. She did not laugh at the words a storm in a teacup. Some raucous, cruel words about five cents misspent were as serious in a woman’s life as a debate on war appropriations in Congress: all the civil war of ten years roared into their smoky words when they shrieked, maddened, at each other; all the snakes of hate hissed. Cells are covered with the rhymes of the condemned, so was this house with Henny’s life sentence, invisible but thick as woven fabric. Here she sat to play solitaire, the late sun shining on the cards and on the green and red squares of the linoleum. When Sam was out, if Henny felt restless, she would take her double pack and shuffle them with a sound like a distant machine gun, and worry and reshuffle and begin to lay them out eagerly, by fours. All the children watched and showed her where to lay the cards, until she said good-humoredly,

Oh, go and put your head in a bag! and she taught Louie how to play, saying she must never touch them when her father was round, that was all.

Sam tried to impart everything he knew to the children and grumbled that the mother taught nothing at all: yet their influence on the boys and girls was equal. The children grabbed tricks and ideas according to the need of the day, without thinking at all of where they got them, without gratitude; and Henny saw this and so did not bother her head about her children. She herself belonged to a grabbing breed. Henny would also tell fortunes, by the cards, over her tea, though never for the children. While she was dealing to tell the fortune of Aunt Bonnie (Sam’s twenty-five-year-old sister and their unpaid maid of all work), or Miss Spearing (Henny’s old-maid friend from schooldays), she would always begin a wonderful yarn about how she went to town, more dead than alive and with only ten cents in my purse and I wanted to crack a safe, and how, in the streetcar, was a dirty shrimp of a man with a fishy expression who purposely leaned over me and pressed my bust, and a common vulgar woman beside him, an ogress, big as a hippopotamus, with her bottom sticking out, who grinned like a shark and tried to give him the eye, and how this wonderful adventure went on for hours, always with new characters of new horror. In it would invariably be a woman with a cowlike expression, a girl looking frightened as a rabbit, a yellow-haired frump with hair like a haystack in a fit, some woman who bored Henny with her silly gassing, and impudent flighty young girls behind counters, and waitresses smelling like a tannery (or a fish market), who gave her lip, which caused her to go to market and give them more than they bargained for. There were men and women, old acquaintances of hers, or friends of Sam who presumed to know her, to whom she would give the go-by, or the cold shoulder, or a distant bow, or a polite good day, or a black look, or a look black as thunder, and there were silly old roosters, creatures like a dying duck in a thunderstorm, filthy old pawers, and YMCA sick chickens, and women thin as a rail and men fat as a pork barrel, and women with blouses so puffed out that she wanted to stick pins in, and men like coalheavers, and women like boiled owls and women who had fallen into a flour barrel; and all these wonderful creatures, who swarmed in the streets, stores, and restaurants of Washington, ogling, leering, pulling, pushing, stinking, overscented, screaming and boasting, turning pale at a black look from Henny, ducking and diving, dodging and returning, were the only creatures that Henny ever saw.

What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out! And what a moral, high-minded world their father saw! But for Henny there was a wonderful particular world, and when they went with her they saw it: they saw the fish eyes, the crocodile grins, the hair like a birch broom, the mean men crawling with maggots, and the children restless as an eel, that she saw. She did not often take them with her. She preferred to go out by herself and mooch to the bargain basements, and ask the young man in the library what was good to read, and take tea in some obscure restaurant, and wander desolately about, criticizing shopwindows and wondering if, in this street or that, she would yet, old as I am and looking like a black hag, meet her fate. Then she would come home, next to some girl from a factory who looked like a lily and smelled like a skunk cabbage, flirting with all the men and the men grinning back, next to some coarse, dirty workman who pushed against her in the car and smelled of sweat, or some leering brute who tried to pay her fare.

Louie would sit there, on the end of the bench, lost in visions, wondering how she would survive if some leering brute shamefully tried to pay her fare in a public car, admiring Henny for her strength of mind in the midst of such scandals: and convinced of the dreary, insulting horror of the low-down world. For it was not Henny alone who went through this inferno, but every woman, especially, for example, Mrs. Wilson, the woman who came to wash every Monday. Mrs. Wilson, too, big as she was, big as an ox, was insulted by great big brutes of workmen, with sweaty armpits, who gave her a leer, and Mrs. Wilson, too, had to tell grocers where they got off, and she too had to put little half-starved cats of girls, thin as toothpicks, in their places. Mrs. Wilson it was who saw the ravishing Charlotte Bolton (daughter of the lawyer, who lived in a lovely bungalow across the street), she saw my lady, standing with her hands on her hips, waggling her bottom and laughing at a man like a common streetgirl, and he black as the inside of a hat, with dark blood for sure. Louie and Evie, and the obliging little boys, tugging at the piles of greasy clothes on Mondays, puffing under piles of new-ironed linen on Tuesdays, would be silent for hours, observing this world of tragic faery in which all their adult friends lived. Sam, their father, had endless tales of friends, enemies, but most often they were good citizens, married to good wives, with good children (though untaught), but never did Sam meet anyone out of Henny’s world, grotesque, foul, loud-voiced, rude, uneducated, and insinuating, full of scandal, slander, and filth, financially deplorable and physically revolting, dubiously born, and going awry to a desquamating end.

After Henny had talked her heart out to her sister, Aunt Hassie, or to Bonnie even (though she despised a Pollit), or to her bosom friend, Miss Spearing, she would sometimes go, and after a silence, there would steal through the listening house flights of notes, rounded as doves, wheeling over housetops in the sleeping afternoon, Chopin or Brahms, escaping from Henny’s lingering, firm fingers. Sam could be vile but always as a joke. Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world, and when she told her children tales of the villainies they could understand, it was not to corrupt them, but because, for her, the world was really so. How could their father, said she, so fool them with his lies and nonsense?

The chair, and the slanting of the light, the endless insoluble game of solitaire, were as comfortable to Henny’s ravaged nerves as an eiderdown. In the warmth of the late afternoon, some time before she expected to hear the rush of feet, she would sit there at her third or fourth game and third or fourth cup of tea. So sitting she would seem to herself to be bathing in the warm moisture of other summers. She would see the near rush or distant slow-moving glitter on the steeps of North Charles Street, see the half-dry fountain with a boat in Eutaw Place, which could be seen from the front windows of the brownstone house Hassie had there, and the hot-smelling, rose-colored stoops flowing down and up the gully: see the masts of little boats and the barges, the sole twinkle of a car on the bridge; see the hot, washed windows of dressmakers and the tasseled curtains of a club, the dormant steps of little night bars, the yellow and pink of some afternoon-tea place where she had gone with Hassie when she was a schoolgirl. Or if the wind was high and her headache had not yet come on, she could smell the brackish and weakly salt streams of the Chesapeake, scudding in her cousin’s twelve-footer, or her father’s motorboat; feel the sounds and scents of Saturdays long swept away on the long rollers of years, when she was a thin-blooded, coquettish girl, making herself bleed at the nose for excitement, throwing herself on the lawns of Monocacy in a tantrum, spitting fire at the servants, coaxing her father, waiting for the silly toys her father would buy her—engagement to a commercial fortune, marriage to a great name, some unexpected stroke of luck in blue-blooded romance, social fun, nursemaids, two fashionable children in pink and blue. These things surged out of the past, as she sat there, but faintly, no more distinct than a wind that is blowing ten miles off and sometimes sends a puff of air. If she became conscious of these streams on the rainbow fringe of memory, she would bite her lip and flush, perhaps angry at her indulgent father for getting her the man he had got, angry at herself for having been so weak.

Sadie was a lady, she would suddenly say in the stillness, and, Hrmph! or, If I had a ladida like that to deal with I’d drown her when a pup. Besides, she could not even now forget the humiliation of having her name five or six years in old social calendars among the eligibles: nor of having married a man who was after all a mere jogtrot subaltern bureaucrat, dragged into the service in the lowest grades without a degree, from mere practical experience in the Maryland Conservation Commission, and who owed his jealousy-creating career to her father’s influence in the lobbies of the capital.

Soon Ernie, her favorite, would rush in, saying breathlessly, Did it come out, Moth? This kept her sitting there. While she sat and played or did her microscopic darning, sometimes a small mouse would run past, or even boldly stand and inquisitively stare at her. Henny would look down at its monstrous pointed little face calmly and go on with her work, while it pretended to run off, and took another stand, still curious, behind another chair leg. The mice were well fed. They regularly set traps, but there was no coming to the end of the mice in that house. Henny accepted the sooty little beings as house guests and would only go on the warpath at night, when she woke up suddenly to smell in the great hall, or even in her own bedroom, the musky penetrating odor of their passage: or when she looked at her little spectator and saw that it was a pregnant mother. She would have accepted everything else, too, the winds, the rattlings and creaking of the old house, the toothaches and headaches, the insane anxieties about cancer and t.b., too, all house guests, if she could have, and somewhere between all these hustlers, made herself a little life. But she had the children, she had a stepdaughter, she had no money, and she had to live with a man who fancied himself a public character and a moralist of a very saintly type. The moralist said mice brought germs and so she was obliged to chase the mouse and all its fellow guests. Nevertheless, although she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by: she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.

She would play on and on till her cheeks got hot and then call for another cup of tea, or else go and get herself some store cheese and Worcestershire sauce in a plate, pushing the cards aside.

I wish your mother would stop playing patience, it makes her look like an old witch or an old vixen possum, Sam would say in a gently benevolent voice, in some offstage colloquy, if he ever came home and found her still at it. It did exhaust her in the end. She played feverishly, until her mind was a darkness, until all the memories and the ease had long since drained away. And then when the father came home, the children who had been battling and shuttling around her would all rush off like water down the sink, leaving her sitting there, with blackened eyes, a yellow skin, and straining wrinkles: and she would think of the sink, and mutter, as she did at this moment,

A dirty cracked plate: that’s just what I am!

What did you say, Mummy? asked little Sam. She looked at him, the image of his father, and repeated, I’m a greasy old soup plate, making them all laugh, laughing herself.

Mother, you’re so silly, Evie said.

Henny got up and moved into her room. It was a large room taking up a quarter of the original ground-floor plan, with two windows facing the east, and one window on the front lawn but screened from R Street by the double hedges. Although the room was furnished with the walnut suite that she had brought from home, and the double bed which she now used alone, there was plenty of room for their play.

Henny sat down at the dressing table to take off her hat. They clustered round the silver-littered table, picked up her rings. What did you buy, Mother? someone persisted.

Mother, can I have a nickel?

Henny said, fluffing out the half-gray curls round her face, I asked my mother for fifty cents to see the elephant jump the fence. Shoo, get out! You wretched limpets never give me a minute to myself.

Mother, can I have a nickel, please?

Mother, what did you buy-uy? chanted Henny’s baby, Tommy, a dark four-year-old boy with shining almond eyes and a skullcap of curls. Meanwhile he climbed on the dressing table and, after studying her reflection for a long time in the mirror, kissed it.

Look, Moth, Tommy kissed you in the glass! They laughed at him, while he, much flattered, blushed and leaned over to kiss her, giving her a hearty smack-smack while he watched himself in the mirror.

Oh, you kissing bug! It’s unlucky for two to look in the same glass. Now get down and get out! Go and feed the darn animals and then come and wash your hands for dinner.

The flood receded, leaving Henny high and dry again. She sighed and got out the letter she had received that afternoon, reading it carefully.

At the end she folded it again, said with a sneer, And a greasy finger mark from his greasy hypocritical mauler right in the middle: the sight of his long pious cheeks like suet and her fat red face across the table from each other—

She looked at the letter thoughtfully for a while, turning it over, got out her fountain pen, and started a reply. But she tore her sheet of paper across, spat on the soiled letter, and, picking it up with a pair of curling tongs, burned it and her few scratchings in a little saucepan which had boiled dry on the radiator.

The letter was from her eldest brother, Norman Collyer. It refused to lend her money and said, somewhere near the offensive finger mark,

You should be able to manage. Your husband is making about $8,000 yearly and you always got lucky dips anyhow, being Father’s pet. I can only give you some good advice, which doubtless you will not follow, knowing you as I do. That is, draw in your horns, retrench somehow, don’t go running up accounts and don’t borrow from moneylenders. I’ve seen my own family half starving. What do you think I can make out of the job Father gives me?

You must get out of your own messes. The trouble is you never had to pay for your mistakes before.

Henny opened her windows to let the smoke out, and then began taking trinkets out of her silver jewel case and looking at them discontentedly. She threw open the double doors of her linen closet and rummaged amongst the sheets, pulling out first a library book and then two heavy silver soup ladles and six old silver teaspoons. She looked at them indifferently for a moment and then stuck them back in their hiding place.

She let Louie give the children their dinner, and ate hers on a tray in her bedroom, distractedly figuring on a bit of envelope. When she brought her tray out to the kitchen, Louie was slopping dishes about in the sink. Henny cried,

Take your fat belly out of the sink! Look at your dress! Oh, my God! Now I’ve got to get you another one clean and dry for Monday. You’ll marry a drunkard when you grow up, always wet in front. Ernie, help Louie with the washing-up, and you others make yourselves scarce. And turn off the darn radio. It’s enough when Mr. Big-Me is at home blowing off steam.

They ran out cheerfully while Louie drooped her underlip and tied a towel round her waist. Henny sighed, picked up the cup of tea that Louie had just poured out for her, and went into her bedroom, next door to the kitchen. She called from there,

Ernie, bring me your pants and I’ll mend them.

There’s time, he shouted considerately, you don’t need to tonight. Tomorrow’s Sunday-Funday, and we’re painting the house—I’ll wear my overalls.

Did you hear what I said?

O.K. He shed his trousers at once and rushed in to her holding them out at arm’s length. He stood beside her for a moment, watching her pinch the cloth together. I bet I could do that easy, Mum: why don’t you teach me?

Thank you, my son: but Mother will do it while she has the strength.

Are you sick today, Mother?

Mother’s always sick and tired, she said gloomily.

Will I bring you my shawl, Mother? This was his baby shawl that he always took to bed with him when he felt sick or weepy.

No, Son. She looked at him straight, as if at a stranger, and then drew him to her, kissing him on the mouth.

You’re Mother’s blessing; go and help Louie. He cavorted and dashed out, hooting. She heard him in half a minute, chattering away affectionately to his half sister.

But I should have been better off if I’d never laid eyes on any of them, Henny grumbled to herself, as she put on her glasses and peered at the dark serge.

Sam comes home.

Stars drifted in chinks of the sky as Sam came home: the lamps were clouded in leaves in this little island of streets between river and parks. Georgetown’s glut of children, issue of streets of separate little houses, went shouting, colliding downhill, while Sam came up whistling, seeing the pale faces, flying knees, lights and stars above, around him. Sam could have been home just after sunset when his harum-scarum brood were still looking for him, and he had meant to be there, for he never broke his word to them. He could have taken Shank’s ponies, which, he was fond of saying, take me everywhere, far afield and into the world of marvels which lies around us, into the highways and byways, into the homes of rich and poor alike, seeking the doorstep of him who loves his fellow man—and fellow woman, of course—seeking every rostrum where the servants of evil may be flagellated, and the root of all evil exposed.

On Shank’s ponies he could have got home that afternoon in less than an hour, crossing the Key Bridge from Rosslyn, when the naturalists left the new bird sanctuary on Analostan Island. But today Sam was the hero of his Department and of the naturalists because he had got the long-desired appointment with the Anthropological Mission to the Pacific, and not only would he have his present salary plus traveling expenses, but his appointment was a bold step forward on his path of fame.

Sam looked, as he passed, at a ramshackle little house, something like the wretched slum he had once boarded in with his brother at Dundalk, out of Baltimore, and a smile bared his teeth.

Going to glory, said Sam: I’ve come a long way, a long, long way, Brother. Eight thousand a year and expenses—and even Tohoga House, in Georgetown, D.C., lovely suburb of the nation’s capital; and the children of poor Sam Pollit, bricklayer’s son, who left school at twelve, are going to university soon, under the flashing colonnades of America’s greatest city, in the heart of the democratic Athens, much greater than any miserable Athens of the dirt grubbers of antiquity, yes—I feel sober, at rest. The old heart doesn’t flutter: I must be careful not to rest on my laurels now—haste not, rest not! I feel free! Sam began to wonder at himself; why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker. By Gemini, he thought, taking a great breath, this is how men feel who take advantage of their power.

Sam looked round him—just ahead was Volta Place, where Dribble Smith, his friend in the Treasury, lived. He chuckled, hearing Dribble practicing his scales inside, to his daughter’s accompaniment. Passing Smith’s hedge, Sam said half aloud,

What it must be, though, to taste supreme power!

He thought of his long-dead mother, who came from the good old days when mothers dreamed of their sons’ being President, Poor woman, good woman: she little thought when she dropped a tear at my being sent to work in the fish market that in the fish market I would meet my fate. Ahead of him, not far uphill, was his harbor and his fate.

Another thing, said Sam to himself, is that going away now, Madeleine and I will have time to use our heads, get things straight: the love that harms another is not love—but what desires beset a man! They are not written in the calendar of a man’s duty; they are part of the secret life. Some time the secret life rises and overwhelms us—a tidal wave. We must not be carried away. We have each too much to lose. He strode on, Forget, forget! He struggled to remember something else, something cheerful. They had taken him to Dirty Jack’s house to celebrate his appointment; there they had made merry, Sam being at the top of his form. There was a young creature there, timid, serious, big-eyed, with a black crop who turned out to be Dirty Jack’s (that is, Old Roebuck’s) only daughter, the one who did the charming flower painting. What an innocent, attentive face! It positively flamed with admiration; and the child-woman’s name was Gillian. He had made up a poem on the spur of the moment:

Gillian, my Gillian,

He would be a villy-un,

Who would be dally-dillyin’

About a Lacertilian

When he could look at you!

By Jiminy! ejaculated Sam, who had strange oaths, since he could never swear foul ones, genius burns: nothing succeeds like success! And did Dirty Jack jerk back his head and give me one of those looks of his with his slugs of eyes, to intimidate me; whereas, no one noticed him at all, at all, poor old Dirty Jack. He began to hum with his walking, Oh, my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away.

By Gee, he exclaimed half aloud, I am excited! A pity to come home to a sleeping house, and what’s not asleep is the devil incarnate; but we’re a cheerful bunch, the Pollits are a cheerful bunch. But wait till my little gang hears that they’re going to lose their dad for a nine-month! There’ll be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! and Sam clapped his hands together. He loved this Thirty-fourth Street climb, by the quiet houses and under the trees. He had first come this way, exploring the neighborhood, a young father and widower, holding his year-old Louisa in his arms, with her fat bare legs wagging, and, by his side, elegant, glossy-eyed Miss Henrietta Collyer, a few months before their marriage; and that was ten years ago. Then afterwards, with each and all of the children, up and down and round about, taking them to the Observatory, the parks, the river, the woodland by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or walking them out to Cabin John, teaching them birds, flowers, and all denizens of the woodland.

Now Old David Collyer’s Tohoga House, Sam’s Tohoga House, that he called his island in the sky, swam above him. A constellation hanging over that dark space midmost of the hill, which was Tohoga’s two acres, was slowly swamped by cloud.

He came up slowly, not winded, but snuffing in the night of the hot streets, looking up at the great house, tree-clouded. Now he crossed P Street and faced the hummock. On one side the long galvanized-iron back fence of his property ran towards Thirty-fifth Street and its strip of brick terrace slums. Over this fence leaned the pruned boughs of giant maples and oaks. The old reservoir was away to the right. A faint radiance showed Sam that the light in the long dining room was on. He ran up the side steps and stole across the grass behind the house, brushing aside familiar plants, touching with his left hand the little Colorado blue spruce which he had planted for the children’s Wishing-Tree and which was now five feet high.

He was just on six feet and therefore could peer into the long room. It ran through the house and had a window looking out at the front to R Street. A leaved oak table stood in the center and at the table, facing him, sitting in his carving chair, was his eldest child, Louisa, soon twelve years old, the only child of his dead first wife, Rachel. Louie was hunched over a book and sat so still that she seemed alone in the house. She did nothing while he looked at her but turn a page and twist one strand of her long yellow hair round and round her finger, a trick of her father’s. Then without Sam having heard anything, she lifted her head and sat stock-still with her gray eyes open wide. She now rose stiffly and looked furtively at the window behind her. Sam heard nothing but the crepitations of arboreal night. Then he noticed that the window was sliding gently down. Louisa advanced jerkily to this magically moving window and watched it as it fitted itself into the sill. Then she shook her head and turning to the room as if it were a person she laughed soundlessly. It was nothing but the worn cords loosening. She opened the window and then shut it again softly, but leaned against the pane looking up into the drifting sky, seeking something in the street. She had been there, and Sam, whistling softly Bringing Home the Sheaves, was about to go inside, when a thin, dark scarecrow in an off-white wrapper—Henrietta, his wife—stood in the doorway. Through the loose window frame he heard her threadbare words,

You’re up poring over a book with lights flaring all over the house at this hour of the night. You look like a boiled owl! Isn’t your father home yet?

No, Mother.

Why is your knee bleeding? Have you been picking the scab again?

Louie hung her head and looked at her knee, crossed with old scars and new abrasions and bruises: she flushed and the untidy hair fell over her face.

Answer, answer, you sullen beast!

I bumped it.

You lie all the time.

The child straightened with wide frowning eyes, pulled back her arms insolently. Henny rushed at her with hands outstretched and thrust her firm bony fingers round the girl’s neck, squeezing and saying, Ugh, twice. Louisa looked up into her stepmother’s face, squirming, but not trying to get away, questioning her silently, needing to understand, in an affinity of misfortune. Henrietta dropped her arms quickly and gripped her own neck with an expression of disgust, then pushed the girl away with both hands; and as she flounced out of the room, cried,

I ought to put us all out of our misery!

Louisa moved back to her chair and stood beside it, looking down at the book. Then she sank into the chair and, putting her face on both hands, began to read again.

Sam turned his back to the house and looked south, over the dark, susurrous orchard, towards the faint lights of Rosslyn. A zephyr stole up the slope as quietly as a nocturnal animal and with it all the

Reviews for The Man Who Loved Children

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

slow start but got very interesting as it went along.

[roseredlee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You immediately become aware when reading this book how much Christina Stead might be thought to have been in need of a creative writing class or, indeed, a strong editor, as this crazy novel sprawls, messy, repetitive, overlong in many places - but how grateful we should be that she didn't have these alleged benefits as her genius rampages across the verbose pages. This goes for all her books really, but Children is her masterpiece and it comes as life does, straight at you with no time for organisation or reflection. Sam Pollit does indeed love his children, indeed, he almost devours them, they are his mission in life and do become his work as he loses his job because of his arrogant self-belief and intransigence. He cuts his tribe off from the world, creating their own private language (and this is a fabulous thing, a mixture of mispronunciation and childish concoctions - this book is apparenly based on Stead's own family and I would love to know how much of the family language was taken from life). Needless to say, Sam and his second wife come together merely to create more children after hideous, ground-shaking rows, and in-between, communicate only by notes and through messages conveyed by the children, while their ramshackle house falls to pieces around them. The sheer exuberance of the writing and the grotesqueness of some of the characters reminds you of Dickens, but really Stead is unique and cherishable and should be read much more than I suspect she is these days.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I was a little hesitant when I saw that this book had a blurb from Jonathan Franzen on the cover. But, I told myself, don't let that influence your opinion of the book, because even people you don't like can like the same things you do. Maybe this book will be the tiny kernel of commonality you never wanted between you and Jonathan Franzen, who knows?This book is not the tiny kernel of commonality between Jonathan Franzen and me. I loathed it. I loathed everyone in it. I loathed the way it was written. Every single thing about it, I hated.The title character is the patriarch of the Pollit family, Sam. Or Sam the Bold, as he likes to refer to himself. He has a passel of children from his current marriage to Henny, who comes from a socially-prominent family and took a big step down to marry him. He also has one daughter from his first marriage (his first wife, his true love apparently, died). Sam likes to think of himself as fun-loving, principled, and right-thinking. He speaks to his children in incessant babytalk for some reason. Because he thinks it's cute? Because he is a child himself? Because the author really liked to write sentences that have to be sounded out to be understood, while at the same time making the reader feel like a fool for what he or she is now saying?I cannot even think about this book any more. I understand where the author was going with it, but I got absolutely no pleasure, enjoyment, or enlightenment out of any of it. The lack of likable characters isn't a dealbreaker to me, but the ones in this book were so irritating to me that every page seemed like an eternity and even as the threads of the story came together, it all felt pointless. Recommended for: masochists.Quote: "But women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie."

[pewterbreath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is Running With Scissors before Running With Scissors--a fictionalized account of a dysfunctional family. The mother is the character I watch, electrifying every scene she's in. Basically it's about a man who keeps a group of children around him in order to be the expert--what at first seems nice ends up being him stroking his own ego.

[lizaha_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I kept wishing that I could stop reading this book because it was so ugly, but I couldn't because it was too compelling. It almost physically hurt to read it because it is just bursting with too many sights, too many smells, too much STUFF all falling apart and disintegrating, things falling apart, children scrambling for any kind of understanding, and all this roly-poly, hurdy-gurdy dialog tripping along, ugh. And nothing has so much brought back for me the sensation of being a child in a family, but the truth is, I don't really want that sensation. You know how Tolstoy is bursting full of life in a happy way, and even what's sinister is endearing? The Man Who Loved Children reads a little bit like a refutation, where even what might be endearing is sinister, and the only possible respite comes from the ability to stare the ugly truth in the face and see it for what it is. It is bursting full of a kind of life, but it is a life more like decay. Well, in conclusion, I think this was a very good novel and showed a certain angle of truth extraordinarily well, but thank god there are other angles too.

[piemouth · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This was another hard book to challenge myself, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I got to page 69 and I just wanted something to happen. I get it, everybody's miserable and they all hate each other. I gave up. I didn't mind that the characters weren't likeable, but I wanted something to happen, and I realized I was dreading opening it for my morning read on the exercise bike. So I started an easy book about trash pickers in New York (Mongo). Later I flipped through it (not even skimmed, it's too long) and read the ending. Huh.I just didn't see it as the masterpiece it's supposed to be. I'll read the Randall Jarrell introduction and the recent Jonathan Lethem essay in the NY Times. Maybe someday I'll be mature enough to appreciate it.

[thewasp_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After Sam Pollit's wife died leaving him with baby Louise,he married Henrietta, and produced another six children. Sam loved his children and used them to nourish his immature and egocentric nature. As his brood of children grew, Henny's ability to cope with her children and husband diminish to either not talking and relaying messages to Sam via the children, or uncontrolled verbal screaming matches.Her ascerbic vitriol is also leveled at Louise. When circumstances reduce the family to poverty, there is no escape from the escalating destruction of the family's relationship.Of all the children, we really only get to know Louise but her pain at being the stepchild to a mother who is nasty and a father who is obliviously hurtful is clearly potrayed.Excellently written.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a most unusual family drama, simultaneously frightening, funny, and intense. Sam and Henny Pollit have six children. Eldest daughter Louisa was a product of Sam's first marriage; Henny has been nothing more than Sam's brood mare, spawning an assortment of children that offer endless amusement to Sam and endless stress and torment to Henny. Sam is self-centered and without a care in the world; he prides himself on being the "fun" parent, organizing all manner of escapades with his children. He speaks in a language all his own, full of cutesy nicknames and odd turns of phrase. Henny grew up in a wealthy family, and cannot accept the reduced circumstances of her life with Sam. She lives beyond their means, both materially and socially.Sam and Henny neglect many of the practicalities associated with raising a family. At 13, Louisa is far too young to shoulder these responsibilities and yet there she is, fixing breakfast every day, and making sure the household runs smoothly. Henny has never accepted Louisa into the family, and verbally abuses her. Sam showers her with pet names like Looloo, but also smothers her with his prying and controlling behaviors. Louisa longs for summer holidays, when she stays with her mother's family:For nine months of the year were trivial miseries, self-doubts, indecisions, and all those disgusts of preadolescence, when the body is dirty, the world a misfit, the moral sense qualmish, and the mind a sump of doubt: but three months of the year she lived in trust, confidence, and love. (p. 163)Sam and Henny have such a poor relationship that all communication occurs through their children. Even Sam's impending posting to Malaya is communicated to Henny via her eldest son. And when they argue, all hell breaks loose:When a quarrel started (Henny and Sam did speak at the height of their most violent quarrels) and elementary truths were spoken, a quiet, a lull would fall over the house. One would hear, while Henny was gasping for indignant breath and while Sam was biting his lip in stern scorn, the sparrows chipping, or the startling rattle of the kingfisher, or even an oar sedately dipping past the beach, or even the ferry's hoot. Exquisite were these moments. Then the tornado would break loose again. What a strange life it was for them, those quiet children, in this shaded house, in a bower of trees, with the sunny orchard shining, the calm sky and silky creek, with sunshine outside and shrieks of madness inside. (p. 326)Louisa often finds herself caught in the middle of this marital drama, trying to break up the fights and protect the younger children. While Sam is away in Malaya, life settles into some semblance of order, and on his return it seems as if normalcy will continue. But a series of events dramatically change the family's place in the community. Sam and Henny are unable to work through this together, and when Sam takes charge you just know it won't end well. Louisa continues to serve as a stabilizing force, but increasingly resents Sam's intrusion and control.By now the "frightening" and "intense" elements of this novel should be clear. It's strange and uncomfortable to admit that in the midst of all this, there are funny elements as well. Sam is larger than life. He's a complete prat and yet amusing and likable. He and Henny share equally in their family's dysfunction, and as much as she's a victim of Sam's ridiculous notions, I couldn't help liking Sam more. But Sam does some really awful things to his children, things that (if they were real people) would scar them for life. As a reader, I felt really conflicted, which I think is by design. Christina Stead is able to make the reader feel like one of Sam and Henny's many children -- fond of both parents, hurt and abused, and completely caught in the middle.This is not an easy book to read, but not for the reasons you might think. Yes, the subject matter is difficult, and it's a bit like watching an impending train wreck. But the prose also makes its demands on the reader, particularly Sam's invented language. However, those willing to invest the time and effort in this book will be rewarded in the end.

[jandl_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a perfectly disturbing and most excellent book! What really got to me was how I started picking up Sam's speech patterns, how much that character stayed in my head! Strong writing. Give it another chance if it feels strange. It took me one false start before I was willing and able to stick with it.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At first I thought this was going to annoy me bvery much - and, in places, it did. Sam, the father of the family, is very annoying. He loves his children, he thinks he is great with them, but, in reality, he is self centred, foolish and stifles them. He is the child who has never grown up and so has never learnt to cope with the adult world, and so never shoulders his parental responsibilities. This is reflected in the several conversations he has with Louie, the oldest child, on the cusp of womanhood, he contirnues to call her by her childhood nickname, to belittle her and to make feel worthless in comparison to him. Every conversation they have seems to come round to Sam and what he needs, it is never about meeting Louie's needs. His behaviour is clearly designed to show how much he is in tune with children, but it doesn;t work. The diminutives for the children work to some extent, but they ought to change as they grow older, and these don't. The private language that each family develops itself, immortalising mispronunciations and so on, again OK, that happens in any family, it's the way that the family language that only Sam uses is a mock baby talk that I found grating, it infantalises the children, probably as Sam is unable to deal with them as individuals that have their own needs and wishes - he sees them as an adjunct to him. Sam's wife if Henny and she is, in some ways, his opposite. Not just dark to his blond, she has an opposite personality, very much more earthbound, practical, more despondant than optomistic. She, however, is the one that gets the family into money troubles and can't get oiut of them, partly as Sam just declines to be involved in any serious conversation about their issues. It is the children that I felt for the most. The oldest two are the most finely drawn, Louie (Louise) and Ernest. They are of different character and temprament Louie looks destined for the stage or literature, Ernest to be an accountant or financial whizz of some description. Both are subdued by their father and torn between the behaviour of the two parents. Not that Henny is entirely innocent either. The scene when Ernest finfs his money box has been emptied is a dreadful betrayal. I can;t say I enjoyed this, the two main characters are far to unpleasant for that to be entirely true. However, it was well written. I felt it got into its stride more at ~ page 200, after Sam had returned from his voyage. The final chapters are a rollercoaster of emotion, although you do finsih feeling that at least Louie will be OK.

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book disappointed me. I expected something great from the rave reviews that I had read, as well as its status on Time's Top 100 Novels series, but I was left with a bittersweet taste on my literary taste. I don't quite understand why the novel was supposed to be engaging and it comes off as a little melodramatic, overdone, and over appreciated. If you are looking for great novels from that list, I would recommend staying clear of this one. 2 stars- not recommended.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good if uncomfortable story of a dysfunctional family in 1930s Washington. Despite the title there is no paedophilic element to the story at all. A story about a toxic couple and their more endearing children. And some great writing to keep the writer company.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am not quite sure where to begin with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Let’s just say this book will not make my list of favorite reads. The novel was originally published in 1940 and is about a highly dysfunctional family. It is difficult to say which character deadens the soul more, with the contest being between Sam Pollit, the father, who is a narcissistic egotist that talks to his children in highly annoying baby talk, and his wife, Henny, the mother, with her whiny negativity, resentments and many threats of suicide or infanticide.The family begins the book living in a run-down Georgetown house in Washington, D.C. There is a distinct lack of money, sense and love in this family. Nevertheless, she pulls no punches and we read page after page of Sam’s baby talk and Henny’s bitter outbursts leaving the reader feeling like that have just gone through 10 rounds in a boxing ring. The loathing between Sam and Henny made this a very chilling read. I was overwhelmed by this sprawling, exhausting story but I do admire how the author delivered these deeply flawed, highly unlikable characters and managed to mostly hold my interest. I understand that the author based the characters on her own family, with herself as the oldest daughter, Louisa. If this is true, than, believe me, she has my greatest sympathy. I would have preferred the book to have been shorter but The Man Who Loved Children did vividly and painfully display the structure and the inner life of a disintegrating family and in that, was rather brilliant.

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I just couldn't get into Christina Steads' (the horribly titled) "The Man who Loved Children." I really wanted to like this book, but found myself just struggling to read it page after page. I think it was the writing itself that really made this difficult for me.The Pollits are an extremely dysfunctional family -- Henny and Sam haven't really spoken in years except to bark at each other. The impact of their circumstances is felt differently by each member of their large family. Sam and Henny are both brutal characters in their own separate ways. I had a hard time with Sam, who talks in baby talk to his children and has a creepy way of interacting with them that I really disliked. I liked the ideas and the central story in this one, but not the way it was written, if that makes any sense.